Copy Protection (Was: anyone with an early Option Board?

On Sun, 28 Oct 2012, jim s wrote: A lot of their software did, but the board could have been used for most flux transition based work. I played with TE a lot, but never bothered to launch TC There were other issues with the software. Some versions were even cruder! They would merely check to make sure that the scratrch was in the right sector. Clever piracy programs could merely rearrange the sector sequence until they got the right sector. SOME piracy programs just faked the error in software, after which the lock programs started confirming inability to rewrite/reformat the basd sector. That was Pro-Lock from Vault Corporation. The origianl design called for a scratch made with a paper clip. But, to attract investors, the paperclip was replaced with a LASER. "Laser fingerprint" sounded much more impressive than "a bunch of kids in the back room scratching the disks with paperclips". EASILY solved by checking WHAT KIND OF eror was produced! Vault Corpse shot themselves in the foot with Heavy Artillery! ! I maintain that it was the biggest foot shoot in computer history! WAY bigger than anything that Adam Osborn did! They announced that their NEW AND IMPROVED version, "Pro-Lock PLUS", when it detected a bogus disk would trash the hard drive! Within hours of their announcement, the computer press started talking about "over reaction", "false positives", "irresponsibility", etc. EVERY major customer who was using it discontinued. IMMEDIATELY. MOST issued press releases saying that they had never used the PLUS version and never would. Vault Corpse lost their entire customer base INSTANTLY. They NEVER got a customer for it, and never sold a single Pro-Lock PLUS. EVER. NOT ONE. Nevertheless, word was out! For decades, less than completely competent computer advice columnists would answer problems that they didn't understand with stuff like, "maybe it's a virus! or a copy protection program out of control!" Yes, it was! I was never involved in it. Well, barely. My publisher (May they Rot In Pieces) used copy protection. Once I regained publication rights, I put a copy protection on XenoCopy-PC, that removed itself as soon as the customer supplied their name (displayed on the title page). Since most people (other than columnists) don't PLAN to make copies for their friends until later, MOST put their real names in, and only a few Mickey Mouse's. MAJOR TRADE SECRET: The protection consisted of changing the first byte of the FAT!, THAT'S ALL! so that DISKCOPY (and the install program) thought that it was a single sided disk, and attempts to COPY the UNINSTALLED .EXE failed. Once INSTALL ran, it copied their name and checksum into the .EXE, and changed that byte back. When some people contemplated giving their friends copies, they would hesitate because their name was irrevocably embedded in the title page. XenoCopy-PC (and damn near anything else) could copy the uninstalled disk, but DISKCOPY could not. Just for sport: One of the flaws in CopyII was total reliance on the index hole. If you created a disk without an index hole, it choked. 1) modify a drive to index off of the spindle, instead of the index hole, and FORMAT the disk. It now has an index hole in the wrong place! Depending on where, THAT might be enough! 2) to create a disk without an index hole, flip it over! then format with the modified drive. But, somebody COULD punch a hole in the jacket, and have an index hole, albeit possibly in the wrong place. SO, start with a hard-sectored disk! Now, if they punch a hole, they have too many index holes, and CopyII chokes. The result from these steps, if done, would create a disk that CopyII couldn't touch, but that DISKCOPY would have no problems making a usable copy from! If just for sport, that's where we leave it! If you actually WANT copy protection for some godawful reason, then add something trivial to stop DISKCOPY and the like. What was even more fun was to create a multi-format (read-only?) 5.25" distribution disk format! Since disk formats use a lot of different locations for the DIRectory, it was possible to put half a dozen different DIRectories at different, appropriate locations on the same disk, each pointing to it's own appropriate file. Since the file had to be written on some tracks in 256 byte sectors, on some as 512 byte, and some as 1024 byte, you could only use about a quarter of the disk capacity. (You can ask David Dunfield why 128 byte wasn't one of my choices!) Coco and TRS80 were mutually exclusive (pick only one!) due to all having their DIRectory on track 17, but Apple][ cou8ld use part of the backside, since it wasn't reliant on an index hole. But CP/M DIRectories on tracks 1,2,3, with mixed sector sizes on those tracks, relying on the OS stopping as soon as it had found the desired file directory entry on the first of its sectors, and therefore not needing the entire track. Could even flip the disk for another group of DIRectory tracks, AND you could have Apple][ on the backside of the disk and TRS80 on the front. It didn't even need to be a single sided MS-DOS or other formats, as long as you avoided using any of the tracks that you used on the backside for Apple][ or any other "backside" formats. No expected longevity for its usefulness, since distribution on multiple CP/M formats was already doomed. (As Dysan found out when they bet the company on 3.25") On 3.5", MS-DOS and early Mac can't EASILY co-exist, but there are some further tricks. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com